Time, not bandwidth/delay, is the key

You are exactly correct that any real solution for AQM must be time based; the rate of draining a buffer and the rate of growth of a buffer are related to the incoming and outing data per unit time.

As you note, not all bytes are created equal; the best example is in 802.11 where a byte in a multicast/broadcast packet can be 100 times more expensive than a unicast payload.

Thankfully, in miac80211 is a package called Minstrel, which is, on an on-going dynamic basis, keeping track of the costs of each packet (802.11n aggregation in particular makes this "interesting".

So the next step is to hook up appropriate AQM algorithms to it such as eBDP or the "RED Light" algorithm that Kathie Nichols and Van Jacobson are again trying to make work. John Linvile's quick reimplementation of eBDP (the current patch is in the debloat-testing tree) does not do this as yet and can't go upstream in it's current form for this and other reasons. eBDP seems to help as Van predicted it should (he pointed me at it in January), but we've not tested it much as
yet.

The challenge after that is going to be to get that all working while dealing with all the buffering issues along the way in the face of aggregation and QOS classification. There are some fun challenges for those who want to make this all work well; it's at least a three dimensional problem, so there will be no easy trivial solution ultimately, and will be a challenge. It's way beyond my understanding of Linux internals.

Please come help!